It is a cliché that retiring academics look forward to some variation of “finally getting some research done”, freed of the daily tasks that come with a university career. William Steele retired from International Christian University in Tokyo in 2018, and his newest book, Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, draws upon a career of teaching 19th- and 20th-century Japanese history, and a personal collection of prints and images.
The book is not a conventional research monograph on a tightly focused subject, nor is it popular narrative history. Rather, it is a collection of standalone chapters, grouped around a loosely unifying theme. The subjects range chronologically from the end of the Tokugawa period to the First World War, with a focus on the years either side of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and they include a number of approaches, generally linked by close attention to source material, whether American newspapers, Tokugawa era prints, or political essays.

M. William Steele (Harvard University Press, August 2024)
For me, the highlights of the book are two chapters on late Tokugawa era prints, and the translations of two early Meiji era essays. The book is beautifully set and printed, with images augmenting all of the chapters, but they are particularly important, and visually appealing, in the chapters on visual sources, where the images are reproduced in full color. The first of these chapters analyzes a print documenting the last years of the Tokugawa regime. It charts a series of the most significant events over the years—the arrival of Matthew Perry’s mission from the United States, say, or the assassination of the Shogun’s representative, Ii Naosuke by disaffected samurai—as well as other events and revolts that have largely been forgotten in the conventional narrative of Japan in the 1860s. Alongside the images of these national events, the print records the price of rice for the year, revealing the enduring importance of basic domestic economic factors alongside national politics.
Steele follows up this chapter with one which examines the tradition of satirical prints in Edo during the same period. The Tokugawa Shogunate strictly enforced a ban on political commentary, but the artists and writers of the capital got around this with imaginative use of imagery and wordplay. Steele outlines how artists used the patterns on their subjects’ kimonos to indicate key political figures such as the Shogun, the Emperor, and other key samurai groups engaged in struggle over the control of the country. This way, they could turn scenes of children’s games, a bathhouse or cherry blossom viewing into political commentary.
The audience for these prints, the residents of Edo, were concerned at the disruption like the country as a whole, but they were also unsettled about what it meant for the future of them and their city. The prints reveal a concern about the role played by the Shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, who put up relatively little fight against rivals from the western half of the country. One print shows him sitting at a Go board, handing the white stones to the Emperor, a scene revealed by Steele as a comment on the surrender of the capital and castle (shiro meaning both white and castle in Japanese).
These chapters demonstrate that even as the Shogunate sought to legislate the public sphere out of existence, people were engaged with events and found ways of commenting on them. Steele goes on to provide a series of translations from participants in the restoration and intellectuals. The first is a petition from Fukuzawa Yukichi, pressing the Shogun to stern action against the rebellious domains who were shortly to bring him down. Fukuzawa, until recently the face of the 10,000 yen note, is mostly known as a studious (and perhaps slightly boring) scholar, who advocated education and study of the West as the route to Japan’s advancement. This translation reveals his younger self as a more headstrong and impulsive figure, willing to countenance violence in defense of the old order.
The second translation is a parody of one of Fukuzawa’s more famous works. Again making use of the Japanese language’s rich store of (near) homophones, An Encouragement of Learning (Gakumon No Susume) becomes Sparrows at the Gate of Learning (Gakumon No Suzume). This takes the form of a dialogue between two sparrows who argue the merits of Western and Japanese culture (and given the author’s perspective, the pro-Japanese sparrow gets most of the good lines). Together with other shorter translations, such as a list of the “fools of Westernisation”, ranked in the style of sumo wrestling, Steele demonstrates that the Japanese responded to the lure of the West in diverse and perhaps unexpected ways.
Rethinking Japan’s Modernity is in some respects an unusual scholarly work, and one that perhaps was easier to write as a retiring/retired historian than as one still navigating a career within a university system. While the lack of a closely-argued central thesis does not detract from the experience of reading a series of engrossing essays on a diverse collection of historical subjects, it is worth stepping back and reflecting on what lessons are revealed by putting the chapters together into a single work.
In his title Steele asks us to rethink Japanese modernity—I would identify two starting points with this objective in mind. The first relates to chronology and periodization. The book covers a timespan from the late Tokugawa period into the Taisho, or even early Showa period—a fairly long span connecting the end of one age beyond the usual endpoint of the start of the next. This implicitly envisages a gradual onset of modernity, starting earlier and taking longer than a more discrete model of modernization might represent. The second point is to highlight the rich, complex, and sophisticated visual and literary responses that Japanese people made to the crises which beset the country in the middle of the 19th century. These demonstrate not only conflicting attitudes toward Western civilization, they demonstrate the deep resources which Japanese culture and society provided to those looking to respond to the challenges they faced.
Taken together, these two points, the gradual onset of modernity and the rich native cultural basis, suggest a Japanese modernity which was not straightforwardly received from abroad through contact with the West, but which was produced in the interaction between Japanese and Western, drawing on new ideas from overseas, but building upon the strengths of existing state and society. While I think that this is something that most practicing historians of Japan would recognize to some extent, it’s perhaps less thoroughly integrated into mainstream understandings of Japanese history which tend to contrast Japanese “tradition” and Western modernity. For either type of reader, William Steele’s book gives us a fascinating and wide ranging set of new examples of the vibrancy and complexity of Japan’s 19th-century transformation.
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